New IRS data 'badly undermines' GOP claims to being an anti-elite, pro-worker party': analysis

New data “badly undermines GOP claims to being an anti-elite, pro-worker party,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports.

In a column published Thursday, Sargent dispelled the Republican Party’s claim of a “‘populist’ makeover, rendering it both anti-elite and pro-working class.”

“One way Republicans purport to illustrate this is by attacking President Biden’s expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service, insisting that it empowers a strike force of bureaucrats to prey on ordinary Americans,” Sargent explained.

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But new IRS data “undermines” that claim, Sargent wrote. “It shows that if Republicans get their way with regard to the IRS, a nontrivial number of very rich Americans would continue to underpay taxes they owe,” he added.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) provided IRS data to the Washington Post that revealed “nearly 1,000 tax filers who earn more that $1 million per year have still not filed federal return taxes for at least one year from 2017 to 2020.” According to the data, high earners “owe a total of more than $900 million in federal taxes,” the Post reports.

“These are people who essentially blow raspberries at the IRS,” Wyden said. “They’re sophisticated people. They know this is wrong, wrong, wrong. And they do it anyway.”

As Sargent noted, “an underfunded IRS is what Republicans are advocating for.”

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“Starving the IRS has been a longtime Republican project," he added, noting the “irony to the GOP’s ‘working class’” posture:

Jean Ross, a tax expert at the Center for American Progress, points out that high-end avoiders — such as those documented in the IRS data — often can afford lawyers and accountants who aggressively shield income. By contrast, wage earners’ incomes are reported to the IRS by employers.

So while Republicans claim that funding the IRS will disproportionately hurt ordinary Americans, doing so actually makes it more likely that elites and workers will be treated equivalently. “It moves us closer to a world where everybody pays the taxes they legally owe,” Ross says, “rather than continuing current disparities, where unpaid taxes are disproportionately owed by the very wealthy.” Republican policies would make those disparities worse.

Read his full analysis at the Washington Post.